WikiWordLooksStupidAndAreNotNormal

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:01:32 GMT

(Oh boy, this live blog thing is catching on.)

In today's episode, I'm covering Eric Burke talking about his latest project—The (as of yet) Unnamed Wiki at the OCI internal Java lunch.

(An aside, my last blog entry was an marketing experiment. I've promised Fabian not to use the numerics trick in the future. However I have to make an exception for today.)

Three Quotes From Eric Burke

WikiWordLooksStupidAndAreNotNormal
You can't believe how easy it is to code up a custom tag. I use the Sun provided frameworks: Servlets and JSP. I don't need the bolt-on frameworks.
I've used Spring in the past. Spring taught me how to write better code to the point that now I don't have to use Spring any more.

On with the talk (First person is Eric now.).

The Itch

For every project I worked on, I have to manage documentations (requirements, etc.) On some projects I created web pages for that purpose. However I soon found out that people don't like to edit HTML pages. They just don't do it. They revert back to Word documents and email.
Existing requirement management tools such as Doors or Caliber are proprietary and Windows only, and not easy to use. They produce Word documents.
A Wiki is a good way of capturing project documentations. But the open source ones are all too hard to use, especially for non-geeks. The commercial ones, Confluence (really good) and JotSpot (the best wiki ever), are excellent but expensive.

The Goals

My goal is not to compete with some of the crappy open source Wikis, but to compete with the commercial Wikis.

Easy for non-geeks
WYSIWYG editing
Image handling
Email integration, even Word integration
Make information findable, Google-quality search
Open and extensible (Web services APIs)
Tagging
Customizable syndication everywhere
Super easy to rename and arrange content
Linking API

Mine is Better

It will have integration built in
It will be an application platform for building things like discussion forums
It will have WYSIWYG editing
It will have very easy page renaming
It will have tags and feeds
It will have Google like searches.

The Plan

Data model is the key. I want to be able to rename pages and have the links automatically updated. And I want a solid data model from day one.
Focus on usability.
Web services integration API
Open Source

The Technologies

EJB 3
Servlets
JSP
JSTL
HSQLDB
FCKEditor
XFire

The Demo

I think people are going to like this.

(First person is Weiqi now.) I hope Eric can pull this off because I really really liked the demo.

Weiqi Gao's Observations - wikis tag